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Tuesday
Yesterday, with Banned Books Week in mind, I surmised that rightwing book censors have been going after Stephen King’s novels because he voices dark truths about America that they would prefer to keep hidden. I can say the same about Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which schools all around the country have been removing from libraries. Like King, Morrison delves into America’s long history of violence and the scars it has left on our collective psyche.
There’s a positive note here as well, however. Both authors believe that, in acknowledging and facing up to that history, we can begin to move past it. Unlike MAGA, they believe the only way past is through. Closing one’s eyes, on the other hand, just compounds the problem.
I taught both IT and Beloved in fantasy classes at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. I taught King in my American Fantasy class, in which I identified a light strain and a dark strain of fantasy running through American literature. (There’s also a fantasy tradition in Native American literature, but that’s in a class by itself.) The light strain, originating in John Winthrop’s analogy of “American as a city on the hill,” would go on to include L. Frank Baum (who in The Wizard of Oz set out write a fairy tale without shadows) and Walt Disney. The dark strain, which could also be called the gothic strain, includes Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and King. At the core of gothic horror is Freud’s theory of the uncanny or spooky, where we repress our fears, only to see them return as monsters. (Freud called this “the return of the repressed”—or as the sci-film film Forbidden Planet put it, “monsters from the id.”) As I noted yesterday, King dreams America’s nightmares.
Beloved, meanwhile, I once taught in a Magical Realism course, along with Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. In both courses I pointed out that fantasy, as Rushdie has noted, gives authors a special freedom in exploring volatile issues.
In IT, a group of children must battle with America’s dark id (personified by Pennywise the clown) and then, when they have forgotten all about the struggle, must battle with it again as adults. The one member of “the Losers Club” who does not forget is librarian Mike Hanlon, who acts as King’s avatar, finding connections between periodic explosions of violence. (Everyone else lives in blissful ignorance.) Hanlon calls the group back together when he realizes that Pennywise is preparing to attack again.
Hanlon is African American, the only person of color in the group, and I believe that King has made this choice because he sees African Americans as being particularly attuned to America’s long history of violence. Blacks remember when whites forget, in large part because the racism remains. Morrison’s Nobel-winning masterpiece bears this out.
I noted a week ago, in a post about Beloved and the famous “Scourged Back” photo from the Civil War, why right wingers have attacked Beloved. White supremacists don’t want Americans to be reading about the horrors of slavery, which could be so intense that they would drive a mother to kill her daughter. What they don’t realize is that King and Morrison both offer them a way out of the anger that is contorting their lives.
In battling with IT, the former child companions are not without resources as they face their fears. As children, they forged friendships across race, gender, class, and neurodiversity lines, forming a kind of mini American republic. In the end, they are saved by this companionship, along with their willingness and courage to grapple with their individual demons.
Morrison’s vision is more complex, but a major concern is the scars borne by African Americans over the trauma of slavery and of racism generally. Sethe is haunted by the child she killed, her lover Paul D is haunted by his own history as a slave, and Sethe’s living daughter Denver finds herself trapped in her mother’s guilt and sorrow. The haunting takes the form of the dead child returning as a ghost (Beloved) and holding them all in thrall.
By returning, however, Beloved also gives the characters the chance to revisit the trauma each has buried, and this proves to be the first step to moving past it. Through a community exorcism; through individual courage on the part of Denver (she first mothers her mother and then breaks from the family to live her own life); and through the love of Paul D for Sethe—he tells her that she herself is worthy of love and there’s a chance that she will believe him—the novel ends on a brighter note. We don’t have to remain forever stuck in the past.
Those who want to erase America’s long history of barbarism rather than facing it will remain stuck in a constant state of regression. It’s an empty way to live the precious life you have been given.
